As network technology continues to into pour itself into every facet of existence, we now find ourselves in a new state of adolescence, a landscape filled with grey areas and black holes—stretching, contracting, and continually shapeshifting. This issue takes a look at those who have made themselves at home in this protean terrain, embracing the ambiguity and uni-sexuality of the unknown.

“The past is not romantic to me. The future is romantic to me,” says RAF SIMONS, a designer whose menswear label has become an oracle of its own pre-Internet notion of beauty and freedom. With a practice rooted in the site specificity of IRL subculture and the iconoclasm of the 20th century avant-garde, Raf Simons has turned the charged ambivalence of youth into a comprehensive design methodology. Our cover dossier 1995-2015: A Raf Simons Retrospective celebrates the 20th anniversary of the label with an investigation into the underpinnings a menswear label that seems to exist in a perpetual state of youthful becoming. Alongside an extensive interview with the designer himself, PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ’s profile on Raf Simons charts the ascension of the enigmatic figure behind the label. Meanwhile photographer WILLY VANDERPERRE and stylist OLIVIER RIZZO take us deep inside the Raf Simons archive for a study of the archetypes that have spanned across all 40 of Simons’ collections.

In a context where information flows freely across platforms, RICHARD TURLEY has operated through his own brand of “lazy modernism”. Widely known through his work at Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a master of the 21st century magazine cover, the graphic designer has moved on to the world of television, where he plans to revive the anarchy that once defined MTV in a much-changed media landscape.

What does the World Wide Web’s compression geo-physical boundaries entail for the future of architecture? 032c’s Carson Chan speaks with ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS, an architect who has taken the Greece’s economic downturn as grounds to create buildings that live online as networked environments. Operating on the opposite end of the economic spectrum, the Beijing-based architecture firm BAM navigates the dizzying pace of Chinese real estate development by creating spaces that appear as a surreal Tumblr of forms and images.

“From a global point of view, the idea of economic growth is a failed, worn-out Western fetish.” As tensions between the East and West escalate with the rise of ISIS, Indian novelist PANKAJ MISHRA reflects on the false promises of the Enlightenment.

“Things are held together with all this blurry material, which we cannot see or measure. That’s interesting for me, how I approach these empty, in-between spaces. Without them, there would be nothing to connect it all together.” Georgian-born artist ANDRO WEKUA’s sculptures operate within the space of the unknowable. Operating through an amalgamation of memories, dreams, and databases, they attempt to chart the black holes that exist within the network.

At a time when Y2K-era communication had forged a new type of mega-celebrity, Swiss journalist TOM KUMMER shocked the German-speaking world when it was discovered that his Hollywood interviews were an elaborate hoax. The interviews, which have Courtney Love speculating on hyperreality and Pamela Anderson discussing William Gibon’s Neuromancer, have been translated into English for the first time by Pablo Larios.

Poet, conceptual artist, and digital pioneer KENNETH GOLDSMITH takes us on a tour through his library of books and records.

In addition, this issue’s SELECT features an original commission by artist Cali Thornhill DeWitt, an interview with APC founder Jean Touitou, the rebirth of the Ferrari F-1 Modulo concept car, a look at the lifetime of Ettore Sottsass, Gosha Rubchinskiy’s tour through Crimean skateboard culture, and much much more.

Past Issues

Today’s digital media landscape has made it more challenging—and more important—to communicate consistent ideas and values, sustaining a message that’s hopping from stores to Instagram feeds, and from fashion shows to published reviews. If it’s ever out of sync, the sophisticated audience you’ve built will take note, and the brand’s promise will evaporate. This challenge is exciting though: it reflects and accelerates the closing of the gap between the creative and the business sides of fashion, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

It’s time to explore the notion of creative leadership. 032c commissioned K-HOLE—a maverick crew of artists disguising themselves as a trend consultancy—to shine a light on recent developments in business that will undoubtedly cross into all industries. Edited and designed in New York, the dossier includes an essay and interviews with Floriane de Saint Pierre, Venkatesh Rao, Eric Wahlforss, and Gildo Zegna.

“It would be wrong to reduce HOOD BY AIR to an oversize T-shirt,” explains Vogue editor Mark Holgate about the NYC-based label run by designer Shayne Oliver. “It is the expression of a generation that sees fashion as part of a broader creative endeavour—whether it’s clothes, a club night, music, photography, whatever. HBA comes fully formed in a way that suggests a new model.” In 032c’s interview with Oliver, Emily Segal discovers what makes HBA a truly contemporary luxury brand—one that insists on the sincerity of fashion itself.

“Talking about the present is talking about something so strange that you’re already implying the future,” says Dutch graphic design studio METAHAVEN. Commenting on its work in a post-Snowden era, and in anticipation of the forthcoming book Black Transparency, Metahaven discusses with Robert Wiesenberger the stakes for design and life at a moment when reality reads increasingly like science fiction.

When NATALIE MASSENET launched the online shopping behemoth Net-a-Porter at the very end of the 20th century, the dot-com bubble had just burst. With a completely untested business model, she grew the company into a multibillion-dollar business. “She had so many skeptics, but she won. She won big-time,” says Diane von Furstenberg. Fifteen years later, Massenet has created Porter magazine, the first 100-percent shoppable print publication that’s been called the biggest launch in British fashion publishing for years, and it may well represent a new synthesis of retail and media. Jina Khayyer conducts a threefold examination of one of today’s most interesting entrepreneurs.

“I think up fucked-up shit in the morning, and sell it in the afternoon,” says JOHN WATERS. In anticipation of his upcoming travelogue, Carsick, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and show-biz master tells Peter Richter about good bad taste and how the bizarre side of human nature will continue to thrive.

Guest-edited by Cornelius Tittel of Die Welt, our cover dossier on PICASSO AND THE GERMANS IN 1913 takes us back to a European society on the verge of catastrophic change. It was the ground zero of modernism, and while Picasso was denounced as the “Cubist Bluff,” a small yet significant group of German-Jewish dealers embraced the painter who would go on to become the greatest artist of the century.

RIHANNA is the unfiltered and fiercely productive icon that every era needs and obsesses about. 032c invited Dutch photography duo Inez & Vinoodh to portray the pop star in a studio on Broome Street in Lower Manhattan for a 22-page fashion story.

A favorite among the avant-garde of the 1930s, Italian fashion designer Elsa SCHIAPARELLI closed her legendary house in 1954. This year Christian Lacroix was invited to design an haute couture collection to officially reinaugurate the label. 032c commissioned Juergen Teller and Kristen McMenamy to capture his tribute to Schiaparelli on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

How does NIKE avoid being a victim of its own success? The answer is HTM, a three-person design collaboration between CEO Mark Parker, designer Tinker Hatfield, and creative consultant Hiroshi Fujiwara. In “Nike: The Spirit Machine,” Jonathan Olivares and Gary Warnett tell the story of this core R&D team at the heart of the multibillion-dollar company.

“TOMI UNGERER is the most famous children’s book author you’ve never heard of,” Phaidon Press stated on the occasion of republishing the Alsatian artist’s illustrated books from the 1950s–70s. Ungerer, who has made more than 150 books that range from children’s literature to erotica, has juxtaposed works from the past with new collages for 032c in a 22-page story.

The work of artist CYPRIEN GAILLARD navigates between architecture and nature, geography and psychological states. For 032c, Gaillard has created a sculpture edition. Modeled from a recent series of collages of images from National Geographic, it’s a tiny monument to the historic publication, which turns 125 this year.

“I may be putting myself in danger, but that’s what I want today,” says NICOLAS GHESQUIÈRE, who shared the story of his creative life with 032c in our 38 page dossier that was two years in the making, recruiting the likes of long-time collaborators like CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG, MARIE-AMÉLIE SAUVÉ, and DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER, with KARIM SADLI behind the lens;

übermodel KARLIE KLOSS embodies the future of fashion and technology; the young German writer HELENE HEGEMANN hangs out in hysterialand;

femme fatal ARIZONA MUSE models new coinages by DOUGLAS COUPLAND for photographer JAMIE MORGAN; West Berlin DJs WESTBAM and FETISCH chronicle 30 years of hazy nightlife memories from the German capital; actress ISABEL LUCAS sunbathes for THEO WENNER in California; ZOË GHERTNER shadow-plays with Malgosia Bela; is BARNEYS NEW YORK Creative Director DENNIS FREEDMAN a luxury retail oracle? JUERGEN TELLER went to a Greek taverna to find out; WERNER HERZOG reveals the world to us through his decades-old archive, distilled in our 22-page image essay;

032c’s latest SELECT presents the best of this season’s books, products, and ideas; we continue to tell readers WHAT WE BELIEVE, and more on 262 pages …

REM KOOLHAAS finally turns his attention from the metropolis to the COUNTRYSIDE, “an arena for genetic experimentation, industrialized nostalgia, new patterns of seasonal migration, digital informers, flex farming, and species homogenization” in this issue’s COVER DOSSIER.

Introducing THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS of architecture and design: “Serge often roused himself from a serious conversation with, ‘Chris, let’s go get a sandwich.’ This was in fact a rallying cry for martinis,” recalls CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER of his mentor SERGE CHERMAYEFF, the charismatic Russian tango-champion-turned-design-legend who began the creative dynasty featured in this issue’s 32-page cover dossier.

“I got my first tat in 1978. None of you were even born yet. You really missed out.” – NAN GOLDIN in a letter to SCOTT CAMPBELL, the young and famous tattoo artist featured in this issue’s 40-page cover dossier, complete with poetry from French modernist FRANCIS PICABIA and a little-known short story by SYLVIA PLATH.

DANKO and ANA STEINER go downtown with LEELEE SOBIESKI and Salem’s JOHN HOLLAND; Munich magazine magnate Dr. HUBERT BURDA talks tabloids and media theory while the king of arts publishing WALTHER KÖNIG takes us back to the first German art world boom; JUERGEN TELLER shoots KRISTEN McMENAMY in CARLO MOLLINO’s Turin estate (44 pages), testing the Mollino mantra, “Everything is permissible as long as it is fantastic”; New York’s DIS magazine invades our Global Briefings section;

032c’s latest SELECT presents the best of this season’s books, products, and ideas; and so much more on 276 pages …

“Rei, I have a wish list for you” – JOHN WATERS on Comme des Garçons, and everything else you never thought you wanted to know about designer REI KAWAKUBO in our 40-page dossier.

ARC’TERYX takes menswear to new heights of performance with its new line, Veilance; CLAUDE PARENT is rediscovered as Paris’ last supermodernist; HEDI SLIMANE does STERLING RUBY in downtown L.A.; REM KOOLHAAS discusses Moscow’s new Strelka Institute, FRANCESCO VEZZOLI gives us a look into Milan’s infamous club, Plastic, and DAVID SIMON, creator of HBO’s The Wire, talks anger and the American city in our segment on today’s unexpected places of discourse;

“I have become a mere recording angel,” states WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN in this issue’s 40-page dossier on the American author’s pursuit to understand the tyrannical world.

Meanwhile, PIERRE ALEXANDER DE LOOZ activates the secret Vogue history of CY TWOMBLY photographed by HORST P. HORST; publisher LORD GEORGE WEIDENFELD divulges the historical foundation of the global networking imperative in an interview with HANS ULRICH OBRIST; architect ARNO BRANDLHUBER asks how we can build architecture in the form of a discussion; artist MATTHEW BARNEY previews the Detroit chapter of his opera Ancient Evenings; designer RICK OWENS talks with CARSON CHAN about the discrete, the lurid, and the total aesthetic; director PAUL SCHRADER and king of disco GIORGIO MORODER crystallize 30 years of AMERICAN GIGOLO; artist ANDRO WEKUA stares us down with a 21st-century scenography;

“All we ever wanted was everything,” MIKE MILLS reveals in our 40-page cover special on ways of getting through the recession / depression.

Meanwhile, RONNIE COOKE NEWHOUSE narrates a day in the life of her best friend PHARRELL WILLIAMS, photographed by MAX FARAGO; publisher GERHARD STEIDL races jet lag across the Atlantic from Karl Lagerfeld’s haute couture show in Paris to Robert Frank’s Canadian solitude; distinguished historian ERIC HOBSBAWM discusses his views on the future of globalization with HANS ULRICH OBRIST; artist collective SLAVS & TATARS revisits the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Tehran with the first installment of its project 79/89/09 for 032c; Belgian art collector and interior decorator AXEL VERVOORDT makes all art contemporary;

AGYNESS DEYN nude story by ALASDAIR MCLELLAN; gallerist MAUREEN PALEY bares her perseverance: “It’s something where you’ve been given a path that you must follow, where you don’t know what else you would do. Once you see this, many things appear that indicate the way forward for you”; curator CHRIS DERCON on artist ANISH KAPOOR’s pornography; historian KARL SCHLÖGEL trumps the heroic image of 1989;

the BERLIN REVIEW reflects on nine events, projects, and people from the last six months in Berlin; and so much more on 256 pages …

“A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed,” JOHN GRAY tells HANS ULRICH OBRIST about the political and financial unrest in the “Post-American Age”; photographer STEVEN MEISEL reveals fashion’s cruel and beautiful in a rare interview with PIERRE ALEXANDRE DE LOOZ (plus a 14-page foldout madness of all his Vogue Italia covers);

“Complexity is irreducible—it is not reductionist. And this is the conviction I have and it has grown in all my work—you embrace it full on,” states structural engineer CECIL BALMOND in our 40-page cover story on him and the engineering firm he heads, ARUP, photographed by WOLFGANG TILLMANS.

Cecil Balmond is a structural engineer, author, and man of ideas; he is deputy chairman at the global design and engineering firm ARUP, and director of its think-tank, the Advanced Geometry Unit. Architects Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Toyo Ito, among others, are indebted to his groundbreaking structural work. Both Balmond and Tillmans have dismantled the very architecture of their genres—Balmond’s genre being architecture itself, and Tillmans’s being the representational genres of portraiture and still life. A dismantling pictured and reformulated in an image essay, in which Tillmans distills an early 21st-century office life so liberated by innovation that it is uninhibited by its cubicles.

“Maybe we only ever learn something when some form we think of as foreign provokes us—and we resist. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the resistance, we end up loving this thing that has provoked us.” For 032c‘s 13th issue, we welcome art director MIKE MEIRÉ’s redesign with new forms of energy and experimentation.

Meanwhile, filmmaker WERNER HERZOG’s diary of his 1974 trip from Munich to Paris—on foot—documents a radical will for survival: “When I have to get up now, a mammoth will arise”; artist ANSELM REYLE manipulates light and color; artist JONATHAN MEESE manifests conflict in bronze; art critic NIKLAS MAAK abolishes the antagonism between ecology and high tech; architect and dean MARK WIGELY theorizes on the strange life forms of architecture with writer JOACHIM BESSING; artist CYPRIEN GAILLARD vandalizes modernism; architect EINAR THORSTEINN discusses NASA, the Golden Ration, and the “real questions”; designer NAOTO FUKASAWA talks to designer KONSTANTIN GRCIC and dissolves his products into our behavior; curator ROGER M. BUERGEL serves up a “content baroque”;

JEFF KOONS talks politics and fear; the three-part series AXIS OF EVIL profiles artist ANDREAS GURSKY penetrating the geo-political fortress that is North Korea, artist TREVOR PAGLEN turning his lens to the moonlight activities of the CIA, and photographer SIMON NORFOLK revealing new forms of war photography; Vogue features editor SALLY SINGER enunciates optimism and Vogue‘s idea of life;

the BERLIN REVIEW reflects on ten events, projects, and people from the past six months in Berlin; and so much more on 256 pages …

“Our lives are threatened by imaginary sources, from images that haunt us—whether we’re in the subway, getting into a plane, or living in a skyscraper. Such pictures accompany us day and night, and we become as soft as butter,” proclaims political theorist HERFRIED MÜNKLER in our cover story on the POST-HEROIC world.

French actress AMIRA CASAR, photographed by JUERGEN TELLER, divulges an appreciation for Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Bernhard, and metaphysics; artist RICHARD HAMILTON asks how far back we need to go to be modern in a conversation with REM KOOLHAAS and HANS ULRICH OBRIST, photographed by JUERGEN TELLER; science-fiction writer JEFF VANDERMEER uncovers the beauty in alien forms;

the BERLIN REVIEW reflects on eight events, projects, and people from the last six months in the great cultural laboratory; and so much more on 186 pages …

We began work on this issue with a simple question in mind: why is there so much more euphoria for Europe at the periphery, in the new and aspiring EU member states, than in the center? ”From now on, the EU will be bold, explicit, popular,” states REM KOOLHAAS in our cover story on EUROPE ENDLESS. Foreign-policy thinker MARK LEONARD discusses how the European Union is as convincing an answer in the 20th century to globalization as it was to the problem of war in the 20th; AMO/OMA present a 28-page fold-out, graphic history of Europe since 1946;

art critic HARALD FRICKE on artist MARC BRANDENBURG’s dark power of signs; 1970s band THROBBING GRISTLE inaugurates both the beginning and end of pop; photographer TODD EBERLE exposes his Berlin diary;

the BERLIN REVIEW reflects on nine events, projects, and people from the last six months in the great cultural laboratory; and so much more on 192 pages …

In celebration of the 10th issue, 032c has collaborated with Niklas Maak (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and Ashley Heath (The Face, Arena Homme+) as guest editors to find ten phenomena in which the contemporary unmistakably manifests itself. Because there is a movement interested in what might be made of the opportunities and challenges of our time—technologically, aesthetically, and socially. “The omnipresent retro-aesthetic is the most visible sign of a collective aesthetic and political paralysis. An entire generation has given up on its present and wallows in the forms of the past.”

“The extreme compression—the thickness—of the present, as we’ve only just now become able to experience it, brings with it an acceleration and a deceleration simultaneously—that’s why it’s also become extremely difficult to differentiate between the just past and the present,” says curator CHRIS DERCON on his theory of SYNCHRO-TIME.

SPACE BEGINS BECAUSE WE LOOK AWAY FROM WHERE WE ARE: From LEWIS BALTZ’s prophetic images of the new industrial parks near Irvine, California in 1974 to the auto-generated red melted sugar landscapes by HERZOG DE MEURON, this issue features experiences and perceptions of space. ”Without the user, all that’s there is material—and no space. I’m not presenting any sort of utopia, but rather, simply the possibility of how the space in front of my nose might be seen differently,” states artist OLAFUR ELIASSON in an interview with writer JOACHIM BESSING.

AT WAR WITH THE OBVIOUS: From the implosion of the white cube to the tristesse of Berlin, this issue presents positions that strike against the unholy trinity of cool, taste and ignorance. “The obvious is as omnipresent and stylish as it is inconspicuous and banal, yet possesses no attitude—it is the Western world’s depressing vanishing point.”

WHEN ATTITUDE BECOMES FORM: From the Cremaster field to the new domestic landscape, this issue presents the attitudes that shape forms through different times and media: 032c‘s entirely subjective selection of the movements that liberate us from conformity. Photographer SØLVE SUNDSBØ captures the monument of isolation;

artist LIAM GILLICK plasters public information posters; writer and filmmaker ALEXANDER KLUGE elaborates on what it takes to define a social climate and being able to “throw it away if it amounts to nothing”; and so much more on 120 pages …

A combination of East and West, Shanghai was the temporary autonomous zone of poverty, refinement, and decadence in the 1920s and 30s. Now, Shanghai hypnotizes with an urban explosion and rapid modernization: This issue captures Shanghai’s state of mind in 2003.

“Some cities are just constructed in concrete, but some can ignite our collective fantasy and make a grand promise of change and excitement. They capture our imagination before we have even visited the city. Much like Berlin, Shanghai projects a larger-than-life shadow on the observer.” 032c workshop documents the acceleration of the city, while photographers OLIVER HELBIG and HEJI SHIN bird eye its deconstruction / construction; artist YANG FUDONGreveals love in an estranged paradise, while graphic designer SHEN HAPENG spackles calligraphy; photographer WING SHYA depicts insomnia in a sleepless city, while photographer SAIMON FUJIO revels in its dreamscape;

032c workshop edits a SHANGHAI DATASCAPE culled from a variety of sources to test the possibilities of experiencing speed, density, and verticality by statistics; and much more on 96 pages …

EMBRACE INSTABILITY localizes moments of instability in different places and times: From riot on the streets of Tokyo, 1969, to the beauty of snow crystals, this issue celebrates the unstable states where anything can happen. “Tracking the trajectory of any system, one may find that, in certain situations, the trajectory becomes less and less stable and disintegrates into a multitude of new trajectories.”

Photographer MICHAEL SCHMIDT takes us back to West Berlin in the 1980s; artist CARSTEN NICOLAI juxtaposes unpredictable models of self-organization; photographer DAIDO MORIYAMA affects provocation with 1960s Japan; photographer HEJI SHIN portrays female relationships; graphic designer MARKUS WEISBECK / SURFACE challenges the white cube and black box with new spatial parameters; fashion historian CAROLINE EVANS explores whether COMME DES GARÇONS makes us objects or subjects; editor ASHLEY HEATH talks with MARK HOOPER about the beauty of pop in its mess and confusion; art critic NIKLAS MAAK reveals MEXICO CITY in its fragile equilibrium of desire and fear; architect YONA FRIEDMAN offers up the best possible universe where anything can happen; writer and theorist EUGENE THACKER on the science fictioning of biotechnology; and much more on 112 pages …

“We are entering the age of the liquefaction of form,” states design firm VOGT + WEIZENEGGER in 032c’s third issue on WHAT’S NEXT.

Writer DARIO AZZELLINI interviews TUTE BIANCHE activists on the beginnings and background of the Italian political movement; artists / musicians CHICKS ON SPEED find out what LE TIGRE thinks of women and Europe; artist FLORIAN PUMHÖSL photographs a missile manufacturer; designer JEREMY SCOTT clothes Madonna in dollar bills; art critic PETER RICHTER exposes the clash between the will and the actual ways of Berlin;

art critic NIKLAS MAAK reveals architecture’s burgeoning biomorphic forms; artist CARSTEN HÖLLER writes on doubt, productivity, and the state of rotation; designer HELMUT LANG talks about fashion’s business proportions, how there are no new means of expression and no cause for new expression, and how to act with extreme individuality; club operator and photographer BEN DE BIEL, director DEBORAH SCHAMONI, and political scientist SULTAN KARIMI provide a kaleidoscopic view on Berlin beyond the hype by talking about their jobs;

visual contributions by FOUNDATION 33, CHEWING THE SUN, MASAMICHI KATAYAMA, and HIDEKI NAKAJIMA; and much more on 48 pages…

“PROFESSIONALISM is used and abused to justify the unjustifiable, the boring, the banal. If it only meant caring enough about what you do and who you work with to make fanaticism, argument, neuroses, crises, the passions of the heart, total psycho meltdown, examples of its appearance as much as its disappearance, I’d sign up to it. As it stands, I doubt I will,” states publisher PAULINE VAN MOURIK BROEKMAN in 032c‘s premiere issue.

Filmmaker HARMONY KORINE postulates The Bad Son with Macaulay Culkin; writer GARY WOLF discusses architect FRANK GEHRY’S “minimal friction” and architect REM KOOLHAAS’s “generous cruelty”; writer and new media scholar MATTHEW FULLER brings the Internet to the Caribbean countryside and ghettos; writer DAVID HUDSON on how dot-coms became uncool; MORITZ VON USLAR talks to RAF (Red Army Faction) terrorist MANFRED GRASHOF on how to survive underground; JESKO FEZER details in a short story the daily routines of METABOLISM in Japanese architecture and urban development;

designer HEDI SLIMANE waits for Catherine Deneuve in the recording studio; filmmaker CHRISTOPHER ROTH proves that no one stops footballer Figo; photographer DANIEL JOSEFSOHN takes us into JACK NICHOLSON’s bedroom; designer VLADIMIR KAGAN explains how after being a legendary professional, he’s now interested in the games people play; furniture gallerist HANS-PETER JOCHUM, security advisor SMILEY BALDWIN, and fashion design INES KAAG of BLESS provide a kaleidoscopic view on Berlin beyond the hype by talking about their jobs;